


Sunday Morning

by Aliana



Series: Back to Middle-earth Month 2012 [5]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-22
Updated: 2012-03-22
Packaged: 2017-11-02 09:09:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her husband's folly is not her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunday Morning

**Author's Note:**

> March 6  
>  **B2MeM Challenge** : Identify a cultural artifact associated with a people you're interested in - how might a different history change its significance? (The AU Card); Women of the House of Finwë (Femslash)  
>  **Format:** Ficlet (~300 words)  
>  **Genre:** Character study  
>  **Rating:** General  
>  **Warnings:** None  
>  **Characters:** Nerdanel  
>  **Pairings:** Nerdanel/OC. If you want.

**Sunday Morning**

_Complacencies of the peignoir, and late  
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,  
And the green freedom of a cockatoo  
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate  
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.  
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark  
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,  
As a calm darkens among water-lights.  
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings  
Seem things in some procession of the dead,  
Winding across wide water, without sound.  
The day is like wide water, without sound..._

"Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens

And what now of Nerdanel: patient one, wise one, strong-handed? Ever careful not to stand too close to the fire in the forge. Oaths and shipyard blazes are now as reflections in her eyes, and she sits alone in white rooms.

Valinor-light did her husband pour into those jewels, but himself, too—more of himself than was seemly. She had warned him, but he’d laughed, saying, _And of myself, too, I give my love for my wife into these. And what can be foul in that?_

What, indeed? So enamored was he of that hard brightness, he’d forsaken the softer sources that had fed them, followed his handiwork over the sea. Taken their sons with him, and the new-forged weapons to which they so ardently clung as boys to the first baubles of childhood.

What now of this spouseless wife, this sonless mother? To her own handiwork she returns in the white rooms of Tirion. She gives generously of her time and her hands, but guards the steady-glowing flame of her soul, meting it out only in traces and threads. Her husband’s folly is not her own.

The figures she sculpts are slender, supple; fitting, she thinks, for a people still young. She imagines the sound of water flowing over rock. The city’s emptied of men; maidens pass now through her rooms, mending and minding her tools, bringing sea-rumors in hushed voices.

One of them pauses in the doorway, head inclined, listening, poised and slender as one of Nerdanel’s forms. Nothing of fire or stone about her, nothing of the hard-cut facets of jewels. Gentle as a stream, as the sound of water flowing.

_Sit for me_ , Nerdanel says. _Just a moment._ The other obliges, holding the gaze of the jewelmaker’s wife as Nerdanel readies a new slab of clay. She is alone and she is not. Her creations will not overmaster her. And yet they will be drawn from life.


End file.
